When the heart begins to think like the head… that’s when real success is achieved,” says coach Naseeruddin Shah to his special student, a deaf-and-mute boy who strives to become a national cricket player. The world of Nagesh Kukunoor’s film is a mellow one of basic and valuable emotions. This isn’t the first film where the director has dealt with the ambiguous world of adolescent dreams. Unlike Kukunoor’s “Rockford,” “Iqbal” rocks to a rustic and heartfelt raga-rhythm.
The location: a small Muslim village. The texture: tender and basic. The end result: a film that exudes the familiar aura of sweet dreams.
Though the music (Salim-Sulaiman) and songs (Sukhwinder Singh) tend to hammer in the message a trifle too insistently, this is a world where heart and head could easily exchange places.
Kukunoor’s control over the emotional quotient ensures that Iqbal Khan’s struggle to realise his dream doesn’t get too maudlin. Each time Iqbal spins that ball across the dusty field, the screen lights up like the sun glimmering in a glorious giggle from behind surly clouds.
And yet a lot of brains has gone behind those spinning balls. Consciously or otherwise, Kukunoor has torn leaves out of Ashutosh Gowariker’s “Lagaan” and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s “Black” to create a quaint and compelling nugget on the triumph of the human spirit.
Wisely, Kukunoor doesn’t allow Iqbal’s journey from bucolic anonymity to national-level recognition to be heavy-handed or overstated. Often, the narration is so light to the touch, you tend to mistake the airiness for shallowness. To compound the sense of an extra-blithe soufflé, there are characters who appear to be straight out of a guidebook on symmetrically articulate cinema.
Iqbal’s doting mother (Prateeksha Londkar), his forbidding cynical father (Yatin Karyekar) and his precocious and supportive sister (Shweta Prasad) and, most of all, the burnt-out alcoholic coach (Naseer) redeeming himself by taking on the corrupt system to get his protégé to be successful… these are characters we’ve encountered before, in movies from “Rocky” to “Chariots Of Fire,” and from “Naache Mayuri” to “Black.”
It’s in the way that Kukunoor criss-crosses, mixes-and-matches characters and attitudes that the storytelling shines beyond the realm of the familiar. If Iqbal’s rapport with his coach is devoid of surprising moments, it’s also heartwarming enough to make you forget its lack of newness. The glow of lived-in emotions springs up on you like a summer breeze caressing your face just long enough to make you count your blessings for the gift of life.
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“Iqbal” is a very gentle fable of valiant and non-violent aspirations told through a lyrical labyrinth of clichéd, but nonetheless charming, characters. The wheeling-dealing sports coach, played by Girish Karnad, or the unctuous sports manager, who swoops down on the new bright hope on the cricket field, are all characters we’ve met on several occasions in various arresting and subverted avatars.
Kukunoor gives a special twist and a turn to these simply imagined people. Destiny, fortitude and diligence aren’t treated as lofty concepts, but offshoots of destiny, better left unruffled rather than subjected to serious tampering. Substance doesn’t sit uneasily over “Iqbal.” It’s a derivative influence implanted on the radically uncomplicated narration by the director’s deft, if somewhat over-simplified, vision.
The performances infuse a supple vigour to the fragile tale. Shreyas Talpade is more than adequate as the unspoken and yet highly expressive protagonist. But Shweta Prasad, who plays Iqbal’s doting kid sister, steals every scene from Talpade. Her precocity and wisdom are put to specially telling use in her sparring scenes with Naseer. Naseer is, in fact, the life and breath of “Iqbal,” never mind if the breath of his character is intoxicated! Through the alcoholic fumes, his persona emerges as yet another character of true worth.
During release, there were unfair comparisons with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s “Black.”
Nagesh was not amused. “Iqbal is not about the protagonist’s physical handicap at all. If you notice, right from the start, Iqbal Khan’s physical impairment is not an issue at all. No one in his family or immediate vicinity draws attention to his condition. There’s no pity or self-pity. Iqbal is treated like a normal person, so much so that the audience wouldn’t notice his disability if Iqbal didn’t communicate in sign language. I repeat, Iqbal has absolutely nothing to do with ‘Black.’ And I certainly wouldn’t be amused or flattered by the comparisons.”
Nagesh didn’t want Iqbal’s physical disability to be an adversity. “As it is, he had enough problems to get over. The one thing that a disabled person wants is to be treated normally. I wanted to condition the audience into treating a deaf-and-dumb person as normal. In that I’ve been reasonably successful. What Iqbal does is to give people optimism and hope. Cynicism seems to be the operative principle in today’s lifestyle. But it isn’t. The film says, ‘Hey, it’s okay to believe in your dreams.’ That’s exactly what’s working for Iqbal. The underdog’s story has already been done a million times, though not within the Indian context. The film opens up this nice little genre for me. As a screenwriter, my challenge is to make the old seem new. None of my screenplays are so original that they make people go wow. The challenge for me is to make the familiar look unfamiliar. Right at the outset, the audience knows this kid is going to win. The challenge is to delay the inevitable without rambling or slackening. How do I get your empathy and not sympathy? That was the challenge.”
About the principal casting of Shweta Prasad and Shreyas Talpade, Nagesh had said, “Shweta is the soul of the film. I wanted the character to take on an adult role without getting cloying. For the title role, I auditioned close to two hundred people, including cricketers whom I wanted to convert into actors. I started looking in cricket academies to get my hero. Then I started looking at actors who could bowl. That made it worse. Finally, I found Shreyas Talpade. He’s done television and Marathi theatre. He’s bowled medium-pace before. This is a cricket-crazy country. We didn’t want to be caught out with cricket. When Sandeep Patil saw the film, he wanted to know if Shreyas had bowled before.”
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